Mark Cuban Does it Again

There is a new and exciting development. Its called an Application Specific Integrated Video Service (ASIVS) . What is an ASIVS ? Its a computer dedicated specifically to downloading and playing both standard definition and high definition video. You connect it to a network that is dedicated to delivering GIGABITS PER SECOND of high quality video with ZERO buffering. Its amazing, it always works and connects right to your standard def or High Definition TV, easily. Most of the systems I have seen have a pretty good programming guide and scheduling system and they will let you download AS MUCH VIDEO AS YOU WANT, limited only by the size of its hard drive!!

If you haven’t heard of the ASIVS, its because most people call it a DVR.

If downloading TV shows is so important to you, add a DVR to your cable or satellite service for 5 bucks a month and download all you want. If you want to watch those shows on your laptop, connect the composite video out in your DVR to the composite in on your laptop. Same with movies.

4 Responses to Mark Cuban Does it Again

Mark Cuban’s posting makes great sense. The Internet was not DESIGNED to carry rich media, and in fact is the most inefficient possible way to deliver it. Broadcast is super-efficient; that’s why it has worked for the better part of a century. And with DVRs it’s easy to time-shift.

Marks a smart guy but I absolutely do not agree with him here or his message. My whole message has been all about harmony between those who need high volume but don’t care about in-order deliver or latency and those who need in-order delivery with low-latency but don’t care about high volume. The only way to achieve this harmony is through intelligent networks and network management, preferably with protocol agnostic methods or theoretically by fixing TCP.

I don’t think telling video downloaders to get the hell off the Internet is the right solution technically, politically, or morally. Itâ€™s everyoneâ€™s Internet and we should work together to make everyone happy. Real-time application users telling video downloaders they canâ€™t have any volume and video downloaders telling real-time application users that they canâ€™t have low-latency and priority deliver is just silly and itâ€™s counterproductive. There is absolutely no reason that these two groups of people should be at each otherâ€™s throats because they each can get what they want under a fair distribution scheme with prioritization.

This frustrates me. I’m not much of a “bandwidth hog”, but ISPs like Virgin Media in the UK seem to be realising that telling people that they can “download a TV episode in 30 minutes!” in national newspaper adverts (often directly opposite a “Get off your sofa!” spread for Virgin Active gyms, funnily enough) is stupid and dishonest, especially if they’re then going to frown upon people for doing exactly that.